The Florida Aquarium is importing a technique developed in the United Kingdom to artificially accelerate coral spawning, part of an effort to scale restoration beyond current rates. At the existing pace, removing Staghorn coral from the endangered species list would take 550 years, according to the aquarium. The species is found along the coasts of Florida, the Bahamas, the Caribbean Islands and the Great Barrier Reef.
"What we are trying to achieve is to dramatically scale up restoration if we are going to get anywhere," Scott Graves, director of the Florida Aquarium's Center for Conservation, told Futurism.
The method was developed by Jamie Craggs, a researcher at the Horniman Museum in London, who has studied how to boost corals' natural spawning cycle by reproducing specific climatic conditions in the lab. Corals normally reproduce once a year, when a fine balance of water temperature, lunar cycle and other environmental factors prompts them to release thousands of tiny larvae. Graves hopes to eventually trick them into spawning once a month.
Breaking the Natural Cycle
Researchers at the Florida Aquarium "will bring corals from the wild," Craggs told Futurism, "because they know the genetic material they need to work on." He added: "Initially spawning will happen at the same time as it does in the wild, and then we are looking to start to break the natural cycle to have lots more spawning [events]."
For researchers, the annual event is a bottleneck. "From a research perspective, for someone like myself who is impatient, [a yearly spawn] is really not ideal," Graves said. "Because you learn new things in the first few weeks, then you want to try something new and you can't."
The new system creates an artificial lighting environment and uses microprocessors to simulate climatic changes, making it a conservation tool. Currently, coral restoration relies heavily on asexual reproduction: breaking up bits of corals, maturing them in the lab, then planting them back on the reef. "The bits you grow back are just clones," said Rachel Jones, project manager of the Bertarelli Programme in Marine Science at the London Zoo. "So you are not creating a very diverse population."
Spawning is sexual reproduction, generating unique genetic blueprints. "If you try to do restoration, what you are hoping is that some of the genotypes that you put back on the reefs are going to survive, you hope that some of them are suited to the environment they find themselves in," Jones said.
Genetic diversity is key to helping Florida's corals withstand bleaching events and disease outbreaks such as the one currently wiping out local Pillar coral. Researchers in Hawaii found that areas most affected by coral bleaching often were the least genetically diverse.
Producing more larvae also raises the odds that more will reach adulthood. "Out of millions [larvae] we settle [on the reef], we might only get to survive a hundred or a thousand. This is a tremendous bottleneck," Graves said. "Within the next year or two, we hope to be able to settle and grow millions of sexual recruits."
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